


repeat iteration after iteration

by mollivanders



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Lost
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-06
Updated: 2010-12-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 11:02:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/331056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(In the first iteration, Ana Lucia Cortez does not make it out of the hatch alive. In the first iteration, she makes it to the hatch and takes a bullet in the chest. In the first iteration, she dies.</p><p>This is the second iteration.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	repeat iteration after iteration

**Author's Note:**

> **Title: repeat iteration after iteration**  
>  Fandoms: LOST/Doctor Who  
> Characters: Ana Lucia Cortez, Teresa Cortez, Charles Widmore, 9th Doctor  
> Pairings: Ana/Nine and Teresa/Nine (past), if you squint  
> Rating: G  
> Word Count: 2,469  
> Spoilers: Through S2 of LOST with implications for S5 events working within the Whoverse.  
> Warnings: Off-screen character death  
> Disclaimer: The BBC owns Doctor Who and ABC owns LOST.  
> Summary: Ana Lucia gets interrupted on her way to the hatch before certain life-changing events in S2 and takes a ride on the _TARDIS_ (which isn’t fooled by any magical island properties).

_(In the first iteration, Ana Lucia Cortez does not make it out of the hatch alive. In the first iteration, she makes it to the hatch and takes a bullet in the chest. In the first iteration, she dies._

_This is the second iteration.)_

Ana’s cutting her way across the damn island to hatch duty, still fuming, when she hears a strange noise she’s never heard before, can’t quite pinpoint. Pulling the gun she stole from Sawyer out of the back of her jeans, she edges toward the noise, gun outstretched and searching the trees for the source when she stumbles across it.

There’s a blue box balanced precariously in a tree and even from below she can hear a man cursing inside it before the box unbalances and tumbles to the jungle floor a few yards in front of her (she jumps back, skin prickling, wondering if it’s one of _them_ ) before the door pops open and a man in a long coat tumbles out.

“Who the hell are you?” is the first thing she says to him, and the man looks up, surprised but seemingly unconcerned.

“Oh hello, there,” he said, as if he hadn’t just tumbled out of a police box that had no business being in the jungle. “I’m the Doctor. Who might you be?”

“I’m the woman pointing a gun at your ass,” Ana retorted. “Where did you come from? What is that…thing?” she asked, waving her gun at the blue box.

“Well right now it’s problematic,” the Doctor answered before tugging it upright while Ana watched, wary. The door swung back open and before the Doctor caught it and started pulling it after him, she spied a cavernous golden interior.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she called, chasing after him and dashing inside before he shut the door completely. Her gun lowered, Ana took a brief look around before trying to find the Doctor again and realizing he was nowhere to be seen.

“Hey? I want some answers!” she yelled and the Doctor’s head popped up from what looked like a giant engine compartment, a small tool brandished in his hand.

“I’m a bit busy at the moment, but if you’d just wait, I’m sure we can sort this out,” he answered with a cheerful smile Ana found more disturbing than normal, before ducking back down. He didn’t seem to be much of a threat and so she stepped carefully up on the platform to see what he was doing.

“What is that thing?” she asked, pointing to the tool he was using on a frayed cable. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“And you never will again,” he promised. “At least not unless you come with me.”

“Come with you? I don’t even know what this is,” Ana answered, waving at her surroundings. “Is this part of the island?”

“I should think not,” he replied, stopping what he was doing and tucking his metal tool away. “That should do it. Now if you’d just step aside,” he added, hand grabbing at a lever near her foot, “we can see if we’re fixed yet.”

A whirring noise similar to the one she’d heard in the jungle started and she dropped to her knees as the box lurched sideways and the Doctor grabbed at a railing to steady himself as the box lifted _up_ and Ana found herself wishing for the routine of a flight attendant’s safety speech.

“What is this?” she asked again. “Some kind of plane? It looks like a box!”

“This is the _TARDIS_ ,” the Doctor finally explained. “And it’s a spaceship, not one of your stupid planes. Completely dangerous, those things are.”

“And why do you have a spaceship?” she shot back, skipping over the details of how and when to the more pressing question of now. “Where are we going?”

“That’s the problem, you see,” he answered. “There’s a glitch in the navigation system and I keep ending up in different times and places, most recently in your jungle there. Glad we didn’t stay long – I haven’t fixed the cloaking mechanisms lately either.”

“You’re mad,” Ana said, decided and confirmed when the Doctor grinned widely at her.

“Not too mad, I hope,” he replied. “I think we’ve just jumped again.”

 

When he opens the door this time, Ana thinks she’s going to be sick. The _stench_ is beyond anything she’s ever smelled in her entire life. Between dead bodies and criminals in back alleys, she thought she’d found it all.

“Oh this is a dangerous kind of place,” the Doctor warned her, more sober now. “The Pollucks don’t like strangers. I’ll see if I can rework the navigation system to someplace more friendly.”

“Yeah, like how about my home?” Ana asked, peeking her head out to spy a dry, dusty red planet before the Doctor shut the door again. “I just met you five minutes ago and you’re talking about a country I’ve never heard or seen before.”

“Not a country, a planet. Keep up,” the Doctor reminded her before rushing over to a console where he began typing at a furious rate, sparing a glance at her. “I think we can get back. It just might take a while.”

A dull knock against the exterior – the hull, Ana guessed – startled the Doctor and he began working twice as fast.

“What was that?” she asked, reaching for her gun again and facing the door.

“I told you,” he repeated. “The Pollucks _don’t like strangers_.”

More clangs against the hull followed before he added, “They don’t exactly have advanced weaponry, so we should be able to escape.”

The whirring noise started again before even bigger clangs – rocks – began to echo in the _TARDIS’_ chamber and Ana dropped her gun, covering her ears as the reverberations began to knock her equilibrium off and she managed to grip a railing before falling this time.

“Hang on, little ape!” she heard the Doctor call out and she promised herself she’d make him pay for that one before she blacked out.

 

When she wakes, the Doctor’s splashing water on her face and Ana coughs, spluttering, and figures that’s revenge enough as he winces.

“You have to stop this thing and let me off,” she states and, assured she’s fine, the Doctor shrugs and stands up.

“If I could, I would. I’m still working on the navigation specs and you might have to hold tight for a while. Learn to live a little. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Ana,” she answers, feeling defeated and wandering over to where he is working. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

 

The weeks go by and slowly, Ana learns how the _TARDIS_ works – how to repair the burning cables, how to run a navigation sequence, how to cross-wire in an emergency. The Doctor avoids her questions on why they can’t just go back to his planet for parts – he can control the glitching to some extent, just not long enough to stay anywhere – and Ana puts the pieces together without his help.

Neither of them really have a home to go back to.

One night (day, planet) he’s sharing some wine from his inter-engine fermentation system and the drunker they get, the bolder she gets with her questions. She asks him if he’s ever travelled with anyone else (he says they never last) and he asks her what they were doing on that island (she asks him what he was doing before).

He says there was a posh office and a man named Widmore who didn’t seem to recognize what a police box was, even in his own office, and damaged it rather badly.  
Ana knows she’s heard that name somewhere before.

“We could keep going,” he offers one day and Ana shakes her head. “My friends. We left them stranded on that island with no way off.” She doesn’t know how long it’s been, who’s alive and who’s dead, but she doesn’t expect the survival rate’s gone up at any rate. “There were some pretty dangerous people there with them, not to mention a machine that was always smashing trees and people.”

“If we ever get back there,” he promises.

“Why don’t you go back?” she finally asks, knowing the answer. “You can travel in time. Why don’t you just save them? Take what you need before it’s gone?”

The Doctor finishes the rest of his wine before standing to work at the console, the conversation clearly finished.

“I’m like you,” he says. “I can’t face them after what I’ve done.”

 

It takes another six months but one day Ana’s buried under the _TARDIS_ network cables when she has an idea on how to fix them (points out to the Doctor how they don’t need all the cloaking and networking as long as they can get the ship to stand still long enough to get her back, maybe get him some help).

When they finally stop, it’s at her mother’s house in Los Angeles and they find her watering the garden with a shocked look on her face, hose forgotten and wide-brimmed hat slipping past her eyes before she shakes herself out of her daze.

“Ana?” she asks quietly, stunned. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

It’s an awkward hug, old grievances not quite forgotten, even in death and time, and Ana turns to ask the Doctor if they can go somewhere else when Teresa grabs her hand.

“A man came to the house yesterday, Ana. I didn’t understand at the time, but he was looking for you. He said he was sent by Charles Widmore.”

(They bring her with them.)

 

It changes the dynamic only slightly as her mother watches Ana and the Doctor interact, asks questions of Ana quietly when the Doctor is busy with re-calibrating the _TARDIS_ ever more slightly, and presses her to leave this man and his crazy ship.

“Not until we find Widmore,” Ana insists, determined he’s at the heart of all the problems now. “He’s come after both of us. I’m not letting that go.”

“I think I’ve got it!” the Doctor announces from deep within the network of cables, glowing softly in a way Ana’s never seen before. “We can go anywhere, any time you want now, Ana. What’ll it be?”

“I want to stop the plane from crashing,” she suggests, having been waiting for this moment for months, and her mother nods fervently.

“Yes. Come home to me. Undo all of this.”

“I can’t,” the Doctor warns. “You can’t change the past without destroying the fabric of time and space.” When Ana glares at him he puts his hands up. “But we can stop the man who crashed the plane.”

“And who is that?” Teresa asks, crossing her arms and sharing a look with Ana.

“Charles Widmore,” the Doctor states, spreading his arms theatrically. “Or he’ll know who did. You were right about him, Ana. He’s not as good at hiding his past as the _TARDIS_ is at uncovering it.”

 

This time the Doctor stops the _TARDIS_ outside Widmore’s office, instead of inside it, and he, Ana and Teresa sneak inside the building through the back stairway, knocking out two burly looking guards. 

“He’s pretty good in a fight,” Teresa remarks offhand and Ana smiles, cocks her gun a little higher.

“Yeah, I guess he is.”

Widmore’s office is at the top floor and Ana’s about to bust the door down before the Doctor stops her with a hand on her arm.

“Listen,” he suggests instead and they press their ears to the door, trying to determine who’s inside.

(A freighter ordered. A team being assembled to take the island back. Widmore, leaving in an hour to set the final items in order before they leave.)

“We stop him, he doesn’t get the island back,” Ana states, thinking. “He doesn’t get the island back, he can’t hurt anyone else.”

“And we’ll get your friends off with that freighter,” the Doctor picks up, planning a thorough strategy several steps ahead of them. “Back to the _TARDIS_.”

 

There’s only one _Kahana_ docked at the port Widmore mentioned on his phone call and only two men guarding it – one very beefy one the Doctor lets Ana take out with a kick to the head, smirking as the man falls at her feet.

“Quietly,” Teresa reminds them.

They lie in wait for Widmore to show up and when he steps carefully on the deck from the boarding plank, the Doctor wrestles his arms behind his back while Ana knocks him on the head. Teresa whispers a quiet warning not to kill him and they sneak his body back to the _TARDIS_ , earning only one concerned glance from a passerby who they brush off with a “too much to drink at the pub, this one!”

(The freighter never leaves.)

Charles wakes up with a splitting headache and a strange whirring noise disappearing behind him. Dizzy, he turns around to see what it is but only catches a glimpse of blue vanishing into thin air before he realizes he’s someplace very foreign with dry, dusty red mountains climbing into a purple sky.

Behind him, he hears a growl (a rock whizzes past his ear).

 

The Doctor refuses to take all the survivors onto his ship (“I don’t bring strangers on board,” he says, ignoring the disbelief on Ana’s face) but transports them to another freighter they chart to the island once the ship is synced up with the _TARIDS’_ navigation system.

Thirty-seven people are rescued (Ana doesn’t check who belongs and who doesn’t), including Zack and Emma. As they pull away, she spots a man in white standing with crossed arms by a statue of a foot, with a curling pillar of black smoke rising behind him.

“So this is it then?” Ana asks the Doctor, hesitant to leave, her mother already outside the ship and waiting for her daughter to join her. “I’m kind of going to miss it.”

“You could come along again, if you wanted,” the Doctor suggests, hesitant for some reason and Ana cocks her head at him confused.

“My mom wants me here,” she explains. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

“I can have her back in four seconds!” the Doctor calls back to Teresa, who arches an eyebrow at him. “And we can have tea and tell you everything later.”

“Four seconds?” Ana and Teresa ask together and the Doctor grins his mad grin.

“Four seconds.”

( _In the first iteration, Ana makes it to the hatch. In the first iteration, her mother learns of her daughter’s death through a lie and quits her job. In the first iteration, she comes across a man who pulls her into his ship and talks about a rumor of a time-traveling island._

 _This is the second iteration._ )

_Finis_


End file.
